Directed diffusion is a data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks. In directed diffusion, flooding is used for dissemination of interest and exploratory data, which will bring broadcast storm resulting in substantial energy consumption of networks. A grid-based directed diffusion is presented to improve the energy efficiency of directed diffusion. Virtual geographic grid clusters are constructed by self-organization of nodes using geographic location information. The flooding of interest and exploratory data of original directed diffusion is limited in cluster head nodes. The simulation results and testbed experiments show that the method effectively reduces the network energy consumption. This gain is not achieved at the cost of either delivery ratio or the delay. Importantly, the decreased load also leads to a better delivery ratio and lower delay.
